About the Archives

[Lawrence Weeks]

Once upon a time (Thu Feb 07), Brax Sisco wrote:

> Maybe I'm doing this wrong... Whenever I try to search the archives
> for almost anything, the results are "Message View" over and
> over. No way to see the context, so I have to click on each and
> every one until I hopefully find what I am looking for. This seems
> less than ideal...

Never seen or heard of that problem...

> And THEN, after I spent an hour searching, I found a message that
> helped, so I bookmarked for later reference. When I tried today to
> go to that bookmarked message, I get this:

>> Forbidden

>> You may not retreive SE-R Mailing List archive messages found via
>> a general search engine. [ ... ]

Heh. A long time ago, I blocked access to the archives via external
links. I did this because search engines were ignoring the robots.txt
file, and I wanted to prevent the search engines from being able to
be used to harvest email addresses for spam. So, it appears that when
you save a bookmark, your web browser is setting the HTTP Referer
header. That triggers the blockage.

Perhaps I will just give up on trying to protect addresses from spam
harvesters, and let google and such index the archives. In fact,
the new archives are not protected, only the old. If you want to
search the new archives via google, add this in your search box in
addition to whatever you want to find:

	site:lists.deskmedia.com

I'm not sure how current google's index is though.

And speaking of google, I just saw that they have a beta free site
search engine. I'll check that out when I find the time. It may be
an ideal replacement for the current search engine, which is a bit
overwhelmed with the quantity of stuff in the archives.

Larry
--
Lawrence Weeks      "Audaces fortuna juvat."      dev@deskmedia.com